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time on idle or vulgar amusements. The idle kind bored them to fury; the vulgar turned their stomachs. Morality? Sex stimulation youth of course will have. The immoral? Well, in the light of history, such questions were debatable. Morality is a majority vote, and the finest spirits are always in a minority. But the vulgar, the ugly, the inharmonious, the unbeautiful-about these there could be no argument. They were revolting. That was all. These good parents of Woolwick thought they were teaching art. They were teaching morals. They thought they were giving religious instruction at church. They were giving it with fiddle bow and keyboard. They thought their religion came from Israel. It came from Hellas.

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The neighboring town, Verona, was the county seat. Never for a moment did Verona forget this or allow Woolwick to forget it. For Verona had quite another conception of καλὸς κἀγαθός what constituted 'a good life.' Its women were smartly dressed; its men were sharp lawyers and shrewd merchants. It set a stiff pace of whist and dancing. How it did disdain the frumps and bluestockings, the ploughman scholars, the stove-side philosophers, and the artisan musicians of Woolwick, nor hesitated to say so. Verona, be it conceded, did have a case. Not long ago I saw a flashlight photograph of the Woolwick Choral Society and Philharmonic Orchestra taken in the church against a background of organ pipes in 1899. A queerer-looking band of owl-eyed Baccha Euripides himself would not wish to see. I thought of the Duke of Wellington's exclamation on beholding the first Reform Parliament: 'Egad, I never saw so many shocking bad hats in me life!' Woolwick parents, for their part, held up the aimless, brainless rout of Verona's whist and dancing as a

horrible example of how not to do it. Thirty years later, as a guest at a luncheon table in an Eastern college, I encountered an undergraduate who hailed from Verona; a charming youth, highly bred and incredibly fine-looking. He had heard of my father as far back as he could remember, and I of his. We fraternized. We compared philosophies of life.

'You,' said he, are exactly what I should expect to find a native of Woolwick: unable to outgrow books, music, and theories, and face life as it is.'

'And what is life as it is?'

'God knows! Don't ask me! I am merely existing in this dump of a college town until I can go back home, make brick like my father, and settle down to enjoy life with the county families.'

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'And how does one enjoy life?'

'How does one enjoy life?' echoed the Gentleman of Verona. 'Could such a question have come from any place but Woolwick? "How does one enjoy life?" One enjoys life, my friend, with a girl and a car.'

VIII

Verona, I am inclined to believe, is a larger place than the shire town of Franklin County. All in due season I was sent to the eldest and most celebrated of the Eastern universities. I went, as became a child of the wheat and hog belt, prepared to venerate. Plenty to venerate I found, but it was not the cultural estate of the majority of undergraduates. These sons of upperand middle-class families had been through famous Latin schools and academies; they had lived next door to teeming libraries, rich museums, storied monuments, theatres, opera houses, concert halls, and soil trodden by the good and great. The air around them was thick with history and tradition.

They were like the man who was told that Christopher Columbus was dead: he had n't 'even heard that the guy was sick.' They were fine fellows. They had, for the most part, superb bodies and robust characters. Culturally they went in rags. Learning had always been a school exercise; hence, a bore. Intellectual enthusiasms were socially bad form, things only to be indulged in by Jews and graduate students from onehorse colleges. As for music, aside from a correct attachment to the football anthems with which college nationalism implores its tribal god of battles, their favorite songs were 'Hello, Peaches!' and 'Waltz me around again, Willie!' Pecunious Philistines. It was disconcerting to have come, a passionate pilgrim, from the tall timber and to find these sons of the elect numbered among the intellectual great-unwashed. I was forced to conclude that the greatest of all opportunities may be lack of opportunity.

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Exceptions, of course, there were. Let me mention one. He was an oarsman, an ardent scholar regardless of the jocular contempt in which scholarship was held by his mates, and also something of a poet. He was forever turning up at obscure theatres where courageous actors were experimenting with Ibsen and Shakespeare. We fell to comparing notes. He related that as a child his mother had brought him up on Shakespeare, Beethoven, and the Bible.

'Why, what a coincidence!' said I. "That is exactly like a story my mother used to read me on Sunday afternoons when I was a little boy-Captain January.'

IX

And now that I have told you a story it is only fair that you should stay for the moral. A story should carry its own moral? Possibly. I am taking no chances.

Why should I recite events so humble? Who were these but extremely common people, thumping and sawing at music fiendishly hard for them? To brag of my home town, to glorify my own folks? My home town is no different from yours. As for my own folks, they have been paid long ago in a higher coin than any of mine. The two beloved and valiant souls have rested side by side under their tomb slabs this many a year; and people whose bodies the good gray doctor healed, and whose hearts his wife warmed and comforted, go quietly year after year to lay flowers on their graves. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward.

No: the moral is something quite other. And this is it. If democracy is to be anything more than a dead level of squalid mediocrity, then common life must be lived nobly and well; and it seems to me that I have been describing one of many ways in which it may be. Suppose the property question settled as settled, soon or late, of course it must be. Suppose everybody were already comfortably above the poverty-line, as we of the middle class are now. What then? One hundred millions living the life of full belly and empty head? God save us! I think the intellectual squalor of our middle class far more shameful than any imputed physical squalor of

'My mother,' he replied calmly, the poor. For the middle class has at 'wrote that story.'

He was, it appeared, the grandson of a woman who had learned to read Greek after she was forty-eight years old. Her name was Julia Ward Howe.

least had a chance at things of the mind and spirit.

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than a highly comfortable and sanitary sty it must be by common people exerting themselves as strenuously for some form of ideal excellence as they would for a great career; it must be by multitudes of common people living lives of greatness in obscurity without thought of applause or reward, but solely for the sake of the life itself, knowing it to be worth all that it costs. That, as I now realize after the lapse of a quarter of a century, was what these Woolwick people were doing. Humble folk though they were, they had in them the stuff of greatness. It never entered their heads that their deeds and lives might some day be proclaimed as beautiful and worthy. The suggestion would have set them aghast. Therein is half their beauty and worth. I know America to be full of this possibility, because all humanity is. In it is the hope of our future - common people living, in obscurity, lives of greatness.

I have not pretended that what Woolwick did was easy, or that it was done in a year. All told, it took three decades. Was it worth the time and effort?

Here let me answer for myself. And let me limit my answer to a single event a certain Christmas concert, and that stirring ballad by Ciro Pinsuti, 'The Raft.'

Christmas of frosty stars and moonlit snow; Christmas that had brought a cherished fuzzy white-woolen rabbit with pink-bead eyes; and Christmas

that came with the heightened glamour of a concert in a hall up three interminable flights of stairs - a hall which seemed enormous, peopled with myriad heads, above and beyond which, by being allowed to stand up on one's seat, one could see the singers banked row on row, and in front of them the racing fiddle-bows and gleaming brass hornbells of the orchestra; hello! and one's own father (how strange, and even just a little humiliating) standing up on a raised platform, making queer motions with a stick there in front of everybody: yet no one seemed to think it ridiculous, but looked and listened quite respectfully. And there beside him, beautifully dressed, her lovely hair piled high in a corona of plaited braids, and golden lights on her radiant face, who, who but one's own mother -looking so fantastically remote up there across all those strangers' heads, as in a dream: that breast on which one laid a tired and sleepy head, that voice which could croon cradle songs, upborne now on a thrilling tumult of orchestra; a voice which shone like a star! It was singing some tale of shipwrecked souls rescued from death, orchestra shouting for joy, and above its glorious tempest that shining voice hymning praise and thanksgiving. The beloved face was centre and soul of all eyes; the beloved voice was poet and prophet of all souls. What must such a vision do to a child's imagination? What must such memory do to a child's heart?

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THE MODESTY OF MAN

BY RAMSAY TRAQUAIR

MANY men can still remember the days when their mothers went about with a curious contraption tied on behind them, giving a luxuriant outline suggestive of the Hottentot. This was called a 'dress-improver' and was admired. To the modern eye it is simply hideous. At a slightly later date ladies swept the floor or the street with voluminous trains, dirty and inconvenient. So inconvenient were they that a little rope-handle was attached, by which the wearer could sling her train on to her arm and so attain freedom to move. That was the period in which a lady's ankles were improper. It was the period of our modest grandmothers, the period to which the modern moralist, usually male, apparently desires a return.

The period before it, the period of Queen Victoria, was quite as ugly, quite as insanitary, and less complete. Inquirers may be referred to contemporary portraits of the Queen in her younger days. By strict standards she ought to have died of pneumonia, and it is not surprising that she was accused of immodesty.

To-day, amid a great deal of talk about 'rights,' woman has actually acquired one very important right — the right to wear healthy and beautiful clothes. She has quietly and of her own accord evolved a costume which is graceful, practical, and, we are assured, comfortable. Doctors tell us that it is healthy. What more could be

I

desired? Yet the moralist, usually a man, denounces it as 'immodest.'

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But woman to-day is getting independent. In her search for woman's rights she has obtained some very worthless things, such as the vote, and some valuable things, such as the right to be educated. She has been most wise when she took her own way and most foolish when she merely attempted to copy man. It is hard to believe, yet it is true that many women claimed the right to wear men's clothes top hat, frock coat, trousers, and the rest. One lady, a doctor, actually did so, and history records that she did not make a handsome man. To-day woman is clad sensibly, yet unlike man. She cuts her hair to a sensible, moderate length, keeps her skirts out of the mud, and, in general, looks workmanlike and fit for her occupation of the moment. There are, of course, aberrations, as there will always be: high heels are still worn. Yet in general the statement is true, and of the majority of sensible women it is absolutely true. Fifty years ago woman was in respect of clothing and appearance man's inferior; to-day she is his superior. But she is denounced as immodest in respect of this very reform.

The truth is that women never were, are not, and never will be modest in man's sense of the word. Modesty is essentially a manly attribute, and from the beginnings of history men have not ceased to recommend it to women. In

the beginning of the twelfth century freely whenever they liked. The most Guilbert de Nogent wrote:

Alas how miserably . . . maidenly modesty and honour have fallen off and the mother's guardianship has decayed both in appearance and in fact, so that in all their behaviour nothing can be noted but unseemly mirth wherein are no sounds but of jest, with winking eyes and babbling tongues and wanton gait and most ridiculous manners. The quality of their garments is so unlike to that frugality of the past that in the widening of their sleeves, the tightening of their bodices, their shoes of Cordovan morocco with twisted beaks, nay in their whole person, we may see how shame is cast aside.

So there were evidently 'flappers' in the twelfth century too, and moralists to correct them. Notice how Guilbert drags in the modest grandmother and insists upon clothes. Adam can hardly have referred to the modesty of Eve's grandmother, but it is probable that he criticized the length of her leaf apron.

Man the artist, the emotional, is also naturally man the modest. Wherever he is supreme, as in Turkey or India or classic Greece, he enforces modesty upon woman. Whenever woman rebels against his rule he denounces each new thing she does as immodest or unwomanly.

Modesty is, after all, a convention. Among those Negroes of Africa who go unclad, the assumption of any clothing is of the nature of concealment, suggestive and immodest. Yet many missionaries, men, consider that clothing is culture, and demoralize their flocks with petticoats and trousers. The statement has been made, by a man, that 'it is quite clear that civilization is inextricably mixed up with clothing.' Yet the ancient Greeks, a highly civilized people, were not in the slightest squeamish about the human form. They wore abundant clothes when the occasion demanded it, but shed them

VOL. 137 NO. 4

completely clad people in the world to-day are possibly the Tuaregs of the Sahara, whose men even veil their faces. I have not heard that they are the most civilized.

It is true that all civilized people have used clothes, but that is far from saying that a complete covering of the body is a sign of civilization. It is simply a convention.

As modesty is a convention, so immodesty is anything which breaks that convention. Between the two there is a borderland of variations and developments. Modesty is usually, perhaps, connected with breaches of the conventions between man and woman, but it is really attached to all serious breaches of conventionality. It is, for instance, immodest to boast of one's own achievements, to shout loudly during a church service, or to eat peas with a knife. These actions break accepted conventions in a disagreeable way. But it is not immodest to eat asparagus with one's fingers, to interrupt at a political meeting, or to extol the achievements of others.

Now there can be little doubt that women venture much further into this borderland of the modest than men. Without referring to those gross breaches of the conventions which all would condemn, women are more willing to be different from one another than are men. They are more willing to try a novelty, and they are more unconventional than men. This is distinctly a virtue at the present time, when we are too hardly ruled by conventions, but it is usually condemned as 'the thin edge of the wedge.'

This metaphor of the wedge, of which our reformers are so fond, is a most immoral one. It is the chosen argument of the reactionary, of the obscurantist, and of all who object to any change in present conditions but

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